Yann mentioned LightSwitch, which I completely forgot about. I added it to my VS2013 installation and I'm trying it out now. As usual with these sorts of frameworks, I'm sure it will do most of what I want, but there are so many screens and selectors and options that I can't find what I actually need without studying it in some depth. I'm going to work through some tutorials to be sure it does satisfy my needs. It's a html/Javascript UI, but I've decided that's OK this time. I'm currently trying to get it to drill down from a list page to a detail edit page, which apparently allows the one-to-many row editing I desire, but no go so far. I'll let you know how I go. Anyone else used LightSwitch in anger in here?
If you want metadata out of a database, I cheat by creating an EDMX, drop all the tables into it and read the results. You can formally use the MetadataWorkspace classes to read it, or be naughty and ready the EDMX file yourself. I've got some T4 templates that convert an EDMX into custom entity classes and similar things. *Greg K* On 6 November 2014 15:25, Nathan Schultz <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Greg, > > I'm in a similar position; I have a suite of "My Generation" templates for > CRUD + UI development, but "My Generation" is getting long in the tooth, > doesn't play well in newer versions of Windows, and seems to be dying a > long and slow death. There is CodeSmith Generator, but it's more than I'm > willing to pay for a stand-alone code generation tool that I only use from > time to time. > > I started to move some of my templates to T4, and while it's nice that > it's all in Visual Studio, it feels like a distinct step backwards from My > Generation and there's no real way to manage metadata. > > I've been writing a script that connects to a database, and exports all of > the metadata as an XML file, so I can manage it with any XML editor. I'm > using F# for this, and Type-Providers make it so easy (compared to C# > anyway). > > I'm then undecided on which technology to use to generate actual code from > that meta-data. I like MVC + razor as a rendering engine, but I'm not sure > how well this would fly outside of the web. Or I could use T4. Perhaps I > could work with an open-source tool like Moustache. Or I could write a > custom-code solution. I'm yet to decide. > > On 6 November 2014 09:28, Greg Keogh <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Folks, I have a SQL Server Express 2008 database with about 20 tables >> with neat relationships and I'd like to have a desktop utility to maintain >> the tables. I just want to list, edit, create and delete rows. A few years >> ago I was faced with a similar situation and I used T4 templates to spit >> out WPF controls, dialogs, grids and code behinds, which worked great (and >> I'm still using the app). Rather than do that sort of thing again I thought >> it was worth asking for suggestions about new tools or techniques that >> might make a cruddy UI over some tables. >> >> *Greg K* >> > >
